1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates generally to document management, and more particularly to a method computerized presentation of a document set view for auditing information and managing sets of multiple documents and pages.
2. Related Art
The creation, distribution, and management of information are core functions of business. Information or content can be presented in a variety of different ways, including word processing documents, spreadsheets, graphics, photographs, engineering drawings, architectural plans, and so forth. In electronic form, these are generally referred to as documents, and may be generated and manipulated by computer software applications that are specific thereto. A typical workflow in the enterprise involves various personnel, oftentimes across disparate geographic locations, collaborating to create, review, and/or edit such documents.
Due to the existence of many different computing platforms having a wide variety of operating systems, application programs, and processing and graphic display capabilities, it has been recognized by those in the art that a device-independent, resolution-independent file format was necessary to facilitate such exchange. In response to this need, the Portable Document Format (PDF), amongst other competing formats, has been developed.
The PDF standard is a combination of a number of technologies, including a simplified PostScript interpreter subsystem, a font embedding subsystem, and a storage subsystem. As those in the art will recognize, PostScript is a page description language for generating the layout and the graphics of a document. Further, per the requirements of the PDF storage subsystem, all elements of the document, including text, vector graphics, and raster (bitmap) graphics, collectively referred to herein as graphic elements, are encapsulated into a single file. The graphic elements are not encoded to a specific operating system, software application, or hardware, but are designed to be rendered in the same manner regardless of the specificities relating to the system writing or reading such data. The cross-platform capability of PDF aided in its widespread adoption, and is now a de facto document exchange standard. Although originally proprietary, PDF has been released as an open standard published by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) as ISO/IEC 3200-1:2008. Currently, PDF is utilized to encode a wide variety of document types, including those composed largely of text, and those composed largely of vector and raster graphics. Because of its versatility and universality, files in the PDF format are often preferred over more particularized file formats of specific applications.
Depending on workflow conventions that may be particular to a single business, or common amongst similar businesses or across an industry, document management can vary in complexity. The most basic practice is to store a single document in a single file on a hierarchical file system that is organized according to directories and subdirectories. This may be suitable for simple projects where there is a single document of minimal length, or where there are multiple documents, each are largely independent of the others and do not require concurrent review and/or revision. Some sharing may be possible to the extent the file system is connected to a network, such that different users are able to access the files from local or remote computers also connected to the network. In order to avoid applying conflicting changes, individual files are typically locked upon being opened, allowing access to only one user while all others are restricted.
Users in the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) industry often work with very large PDF files. These can range from content-heavy architectural floorplans created from CAD programs to specification manuals of hundreds or thousands of pages. AEC users frequently reference many documents, and thus need to load the files as quickly as possible, and also easily navigate through their files to find the information they need. To decrease file load times, many users split their large files into smaller files with fewer pages or drawing sheets. Another benefit is that users can check out these files from a document management system without blocking others from editing the rest of the document, since they are no longer a single file. However, splitting files apart makes them more difficult to navigate than a single file. In addition, these navigation concerns are compounded where various pages or drawing sheets undergo iterations of revisions and are superseded by those corresponding pages of various addendum documents. Nevertheless, it is desirable in some cases to view the entire collection of files making up or related to a single document or multiple documents in a project all at once as a cohesive whole.
Existing solutions require that all of the pertinent files be opened concurrently in order for the document to be viewed and navigated as a whole, largely negating the advantages of maintaining separate files for each document page or document segment. Other solutions may utilize matching of file names or page labels for organizational purposes, which often required users to edit their standard naming conventions in order to use this functionality. Furthermore, tracking each of the addendums and presenting the most recent version along with the remainder of the document or documents is not possible unless the files are particularly named with proper revision numbers and the older files are designated as outdated or otherwise identified. This process is prone to error because the modifications must be made manually on a page by page process, and document checkout procedures may prohibit such modifications.
Accordingly, there is a need in the art for a method for managing, auditing and selectively arranging sets of multiple documents and pages within documents.